ACRL 2011 welcomes Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier

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CHICAGO – Jaron Lanier will keynote the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference on Saturday, April 2, from 8:30 – 9:30 a.m. in a program titled “The Bipolar Library: How Humanizing and Digitizing Must Both be Advanced.”ACRL 2011 will take place March 30 - April 2 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist and author who writes about numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics and the future of humanism.

His book “You Are Not a Gadget," (2010) has been described as a deeply felt defenses of the individual on how technology interacts with our culture and was named by The New York Times as one of the best 10 books of the year. Lanier will be signing “You Are Not a Gadget” immediately following his keynote presentation.

In 2005, Lanier was included in the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2010. A pioneer in virtual reality (a term he coined), Lanier founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products, and led teams creating technology for medicine, design and numerous other fields.

ACRL is the largest division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing more than 12,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments. ACRL is on the Web at http://www.acrl.org, Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ala.acrl and Twitter at @ala_acrl.